In fight over prisoners, Cheney shows his clout

In fight over prisoners, Cheney shows his clout
By Tim Golden
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: October 1, 2006



WASHINGTON In June 2005, two Bush national security officials proposed a sweeping new approach to the growing problems Washington was facing with the detention, interrogation and prosecution of terrorism suspects.

Gordon England, acting deputy secretary of defense, and Philip Zelikow, counselor of the State Department, urged the administration to seek congressional approval for its detention policies. They called for a return to the minimum standards of treatment in the Geneva Conventions and for eventually closing the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The time had come, they said, for suspects in the Sept. 11 plot to be taken out of their secret prison cells and tried before military tribunals.

The recommendations of the paper, which has not been disclosed before, included several of the major policy shifts that President George W. Bush laid out in a White House address on Sept. 6, five officials who read the document said. But the memorandum's fate underscores the long-running conflicts over detention policy that continued to divide the administration even as it pushed new legislation through Congress last week.

When the paper first circulated in the upper reaches of the administration, two of those officials said, it so angered Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that his aides gathered up copies of the document and had some of them shredded. "It was not in step with the secretary of defense or the president," said a Defense Department official who, like many others, would discuss the deliberations only on the condition of anonymity. "It was clear that Rumsfeld was very unhappy."

The debate on detention issues that began just after Sept. 11, 2001, has come to light before. But the struggle intensified over the last year as criticism of Bush's approach grew at home and abroad. Elements of that approach were struck down by the Supreme Court in June, forcing a resolution of the disputes that had gone on for months.

On one side of the fight were officials, often led by Vice President Dick Cheney, who said the terrorism threat required that the president have wide power to decide who could be held and how they should be treated.

On the other side were officials in the State Department and the Pentagon who portrayed their disagreement as pragmatic. They said the administration had claimed more authority than it needed, drawing widespread criticism and challenges in the courts. Those officials initially hailed the president's Sept. 6 announcement. Bush publicly discussed the CIA's secret detention program for the first time, saying he had ordered its remaining 14 prisoners sent to Guantánamo and tried before military tribunals. The same day, Pentagon officials presented new directives that effectively renounced military use of highly coercive interrogation methods.

But even as the White House negotiated with Congress in recent weeks, administration forces led by Cheney reasserted themselves. Officials said Cheney's staff and its allies - having agreed reluctantly to the disclosure of the CIA operation - were closely involved in guiding the talks with Republican senators. Their adversaries in the administration had to scramble to keep up.

"Basically, they were left to get back whatever they could from Congress," a senior administration official said of the Cheney group. "And they did."

In the end, the White House pressed Republican senators to accept a broad definition of "unlawful enemy combatants" whom the government can hold indefinitely, to maintain some of the president's control over CIA interrogation methods and to allow the government to present some evidence in military tribunals that is based on hearsay or has been coerced from witnesses.